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Michael Knud Ross was born in Oslo, Norway, spent his childhood in Oslo and Helsinki, Finland, and moved to the United States at age eleven. He studied art and anthropology at the University of Maryland, where he graduated in 2000. After school, Michael worked in Washington, D.C. and focused mainly on sculpture. Early projects include twelve bronze sculptures that were installed inside historic emergency-call boxes on neighborhood streets. The sculptures depict various periods in the city's history, and are still on view in the Mt. Pleasant and Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhoods.
Returning to painting in 2005, Michael worked for six months as an assistant to the famous Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. He moved to San Francisco in 2006, where he works out of a converted warehouse on Market Street. Michael's work has turned from a central focus on the figure and landscape to include paintings of birds and still-life objects. "Birds are so similar to us", observes Michael, "and yet strange enough, different enough, that we can feel their pure presence without the baggage we have in the company of people." Michael's paintings are stories about individual characters -- about their aspirations, their challenges, their decisions, their connections to each other, and ultimately about our ability to empathize with them.
In 2007 Michael curated, and his works were represented in, an exhibition of Scandinavian realist painting at Hillyer Art Space in D.C., which was co-sponsored by the Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish embassies. Ross has had solo shows at galleries in Santa Monica, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. His recent exhibition Wet Land -- composed of forty paintings of birds and marshlands -- was on view earlier this year at the Norwegian Seaman's Church in San Francisco. Michael's object paintings are represented by Geras-Tousignant Gallery in San Francisco.
Washington Post 2009
Southwest Art 2008 (coming soon)
The InTowner 2007 (coming soon)
Washington Times 2004 (coming soon)
Washington Post 2004 (coming soon)
The InTowner 2004 (coming soon)
